To the original apartments they had now also added various small places for stores, communicating with the huts from within, and looking something like our ovens, though without any door to them. In some of these they deposited their upper jackets, which they usually take off in coming into their huts, as we do a greatcoat; while in smaller ones, like little shelves in a recess, they kept various articles of their Kabloona riches. These and similar alterations and additions they were constantly making throughout the winter; for their inexhaustible materials being always at hand, it required but little time and labour to adopt any arrangement that might suit their convenience. After distributing a number of presents in the first four huts, I found, on entering the last, that Pootooalook had been successful in bringing in a seal, over which two elderly women were standing, armed with large knives, their hands and faces besmeared with blood, and delight and exultation depicted on their countenances. They had just performed the first operation of dividing the animal into two parts, and thus laying open the intestines. These being taken out, and all the blood carefully baled up and put into the _ootkooseek_, or cooking-pot, over the fire, they separated the head and flippers from the carcass, and then divided the ribs. All the loose scraps were put into the pot for immediate use, except such as the two butchers now and then crammed into their mouths, or distributed to the numerous and eager by-standers for still more immediate consumption. Of these morsels the children came in for no small share, every little urchin that could find its way to the slaughterhouse running eagerly in, and, between the legs of the men and women, presenting its mouth for a large lump of raw flesh, just as an English child of the same age might do for a piece of sugar-candy. Every now and then, also, a dog would make his way towards the reeking carcass, and, when in the act of seizing upon some delicate part, was sent off yelping by a heavy blow with the handles of the knives. When all the flesh is disposed of, for a portion of which each of the women from the other huts usually brings her ootkooseek, the blubber still remains attached to the skin, from which it is separated the last; and the business being now completed, the two parts of the hide are rolled up and laid by, together with the store of flesh and blubber. During the dissection of their seals, they have a curious custom of sticking a thin filament of skin, or of some part of the intestines, upon the foreheads of the boys, who are themselves extremely fond of it, it being intended, as Iligliuk afterward informed me, to make them fortunate seal-catchers.